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Methylene Blue for Brain Fog, Anxiety and Low Energy | Dr. Scott Sherr, MD
Methylene blue is one of the most talked-about tools in biohacking for mitochondrial function, brain fog, and energy—and the nuance is in dosing, quality, and context. In this episode, Dr. Scott Sherr explains how chronic stress and hormone shifts can trap women in a “wired but tired” state, why HRV drops when your nervous system can’t recover, and how sleep architecture, minerals, and mitochondrial support may help restore resilience. You’ll also learn the red flags of low-quality methylene blue, why low-dose and high-dose effects are different, and how to think about redox balance without making your stress physiology worse.
KEY TOPICS
Methylene blue benefits dosing and quality concerns
Mitochondrial dysfunction behind brain fog fatigue and anxiety
HRV and nervous system resilience in midlife women
Sleep architecture REM sleep and why waking at night happens
Minerals electrolytes cortisol and the wired but tired stress loop
TIMESTAMPS
[00:00] Metabolic health crisis and why mitochondrial dysfunction is so common
[01:06] Show introduction and what this episode will help you fix
[01:37] Scott Sherr’s integrative path and Health Optimization Medicine approach
[03:57] The Sympathetic Spiral of Doom and what it looks like in real life
[05:10] Why midlife hormones reduce stress tolerance and recovery capacity
[06:45] How chronic vigilance and modern stress keep you stuck in fight or flight
[08:10] HRV trends over time and why “doing everything right” still isn’t enough
[09:54] What HRV measures and how to use it for real-world experiments
[11:40] The cell danger response and how mitochondria downshift energy production
[12:55] Why “wired but tired” signals mitochondrial and nervous system overload
[14:35] Why mood changes and irritability show up when the brain lacks energy
[16:34] GABA vs glutamate and the neurochemistry of anxiety and insomnia
[18:20] Why SSRIs don’t map cleanly to “low serotonin” in depression
[19:55] Short-term calming tools vs medium-term nutrient and gut foundations
[21:08] Sleep architecture explained deep sleep REM sleep and recovery biology
[22:55] Why waking at night happens and why progesterone alone may not solve it
[24:10] Sleep starts in the morning sunlight meals timing and daytime stress
[26:05] Why REM sleep is mitochondrially demanding and easier to disrupt
[27:37] Minerals under stress why magnesium sodium and potassium get depleted
[28:55] Personalizing electrolytes for travel training and high-stress periods
[30:05] Cortisol rhythm and why late exercise and late meals can tank recovery
[31:20] Why minerals and antioxidants matter for energy production and detox
[32:14] Your methylene blue Goldilocks dose and how to cycle it
[33:27] What methylene blue does for mitochondria energy and detox together
[34:50] Low-dose vs high-dose methylene blue and when higher doses get stressful
[36:10] Hydrogen peroxide production at higher doses and why antioxidants matter
[37:20] Redox balance explained energy production plus detox capacity
[38:20] Quality risks heavy metals potency issues and why liquids are risky
[40:02] Why redox-active compounds can backfire if your nervous system is dysregulated
[43:40] Breaking the stress loop support mitochondria first then downregulate stress
[45:10] The parasympathetic edge why “calmer performs better” is real physiology
[48:03] Where health optimization is heading mitochondrial medicine and healthspan
[50:25] Organ-level thinking vs cellular-level optimization holobiont framework
[52:30] N-of-1 tracking wearables and why personalization beats population advice
[53:09] AI caution why models can mislead and why human clinical context matters
[54:18] Where to find Dr. Scott Sherr and related work
LET'S CONNECT
Guest: Dr. Scott Sherr, MD
Website: https://drscottsherr.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drscottsherr
Host: Orshi McNaughton
Podcast: https://optimized-women.captivate.fm/listen
Website: https://www.optimizedwomen.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@optimizedwomen
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/orshimcnaughton
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Transcript
Only 6% of people are metabolically healthy.
Speaker A:Many of us have mitochondrial dysfunction.
Speaker A:About 94% of the U.S. population.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:It's a huge amount of people.
Speaker A:Most of us are able to go for a while until we can't.
Speaker A:Something starts crashing and burning.
Speaker A:You feel like you're wired, but tired.
Speaker A:You can't recover very well.
Speaker A:You have anxiety, you have insomnia, you have depression, you have tremors, you have mental health problems.
Speaker A:Waking up in the middle of the night is a big problem.
Speaker A:The mitochondria stop being able to make energy as effectively.
Speaker A:What methylene boot can do at these lower doses is that it help you on the energy side and the detox side at the same time.
Speaker A:So I had a colleague reach out to me about a couple months ago now and he was like, scott, I've had anxiety all my life.
Speaker A:I started taking methylene blue and the anxiety went away.
Speaker A:Just went away.
Speaker A:The opposite of the sympathetic spiral of doom is the parasympathetic edge in everything that you do.
Speaker A:Because if you can come down a little bit, you're going to function better, right?
Speaker A:But learning how to do that and supporting mitochondria along the way are essential.
Speaker B:Welcome to the Optimized Woman where we explore the future of health and longevity and what it really means to live life on our own terms.
Speaker B:I'm Your host, Orshi McNaughton and I talk with experts and innovators pushing the boundaries of what is possible today so you can turn these insights into your own health transformation.
Speaker B:Together, we are here to unleash the unstoppable force you're meant to be.
Speaker B:So if you're ready to own it, start thriving again and live the life you deserve, then let's get to it.
Speaker A:I grew up in a very alternative house.
Speaker A:I didn't really know what conventional medicine was until I was much older.
Speaker A:And I decided to go to medical school actually with, with counseling with my dad at the time that there were a lot of limitations in his clinical practice because he wasn't a medical doctor.
Speaker A:Even though what he did was very, very powerful.
Speaker A:He knew that having the medical doctor, having that license would have a lot of more leeway as far as what I could do and what I couldn't do.
Speaker A:And so I decided to go to medical school with the sort of high minded idea of bringing together the alternative, the allopathic worlds.
Speaker A:There's no such thing really as functional medicine.
Speaker A:When I first started medical school, integrative medicine was a term that I've heard actually been used.
Speaker A:I've actually just recently heard that it's been used for a long time, but really I didn't hear about it when I was young.
Speaker A:And so when I finished medical school, I did my internal medicine residence training.
Speaker A:And I, I did that because it was the fastest way for me to finish my training, get my license and start practicing.
Speaker A:And from there, over the last decade or plus now, I've created my own integrative practice that initially centered around something called hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which I still do a lot of in consulting in that world.
Speaker A: amed Dr. Ted Achicoso back in: Speaker A:And what really interested me about this whole framework is that brought me back to my childhood in some way because it was more focused on optimizing health rather than treating disease directly.
Speaker A:And it was always the idea when I was a kid that if you just gave the body what it needed to heal, that it had an amazing way to do it on its own without a lot of help or with help.
Speaker A:But we just, with the right urgings and nudgings and things like that.
Speaker A:Health Optimization Medicine is a framework that he had developed in his own clinical practice.
Speaker A:Dr. Ted and so he was ready to make it into a nonprofit organization to train other practitioners called, and so we called it, or he called it Health Optimization Medicine and Practice, or Home Hope for short.
Speaker A:So my clinical practice is focused on this framework and it's also available to other practitioners as well as something that they can take in their own in their own time as an online educational course load.
Speaker A:We have a essential certification of seven modules that you can take online.
Speaker A:You can take it on your own pace, you can take it with a group of students as well, in a cohort style as well.
Speaker A:And so that's what I'm trained in.
Speaker A:And I use that as the foundation of my integrative clinical telemedicine practice from just outside of Boulder, Colorado.
Speaker B:I love today's topic of conversation that you proposed, the Sympathetic Spiral of doom.
Speaker B:I laughed out loud when you sent this because I feel like I spent the last 15 years of my life in this sympathetic spiral of doom.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, I understand.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:And I totally understand what that means, but what's happening neurologically and metabolically when someone gets stuck in it?
Speaker B:And why is it, why are there so many women in their 40s and 50s that are stuck in this spiral?
Speaker A:Yeah, it's a, it's a really great question, and I know it sounds ominous when people are listening and hearing about it.
Speaker A:The thing is that most of us are able to go for a while until we can't.
Speaker A:Something starts crashing and burning, and oftentimes this is midlife, where hormones start changing, and as a result of that, our capacity goes down.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:And when I.
Speaker A:When I.
Speaker A:When you think about the sympathetic nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system is our.
Speaker A:Is the branch of our nervous system.
Speaker A:That's our nervous system that keeps us on.
Speaker A:It's the one that's supposed to keep us safe.
Speaker A:It's the one that keeps us protected.
Speaker A:It's one that's fearful and then keeps you in vigilant mode all the time, or a lot of the time when.
Speaker A:When you're in this mode, and classically you'd be in this mode for short periods of time when you had some stress, and then you would be out of that mode, and that would be in the other part of the nervous system, which is called your parasympathetic nervous system.
Speaker A:The parasympathetic is our fight or flight.
Speaker A:It's.
Speaker A:It's the opposite of fight or flight.
Speaker A:It's rest, digest, detoxify, and heal.
Speaker A:And unfortunately, modern society has created this perfect storm, as it will, where we have this constant vigilance that we all have and constantly on in this fight or flight mode much more than we realize.
Speaker A:And what happens when you're doing this, when you're in this fight or flight mode for long periods of time, is that you're stressing the system pretty significantly.
Speaker A:And that stress in the system is really.
Speaker A:There's multiple different things that you see there.
Speaker A:Your immune system doesn't work as well.
Speaker A:You're.
Speaker A:That's for sure.
Speaker A:But it's really your mitochondria, the part of your cells that help make energy, they get very much incapacitated over time.
Speaker A:And then the mitochondria are really, really important.
Speaker A:We have.
Speaker A:We have lots of mitochondria in our body.
Speaker A:We have quadrillions of these things, actually, and they're in our cells, and they help us make energy.
Speaker A:But when the stress is so big for such a long period of time, what happens here is that the mitochondria stop being able to make energy as effectively, and they start going into this.
Speaker A:This other hibernation stage called the cell danger response, when they're trying to protect themselves and not making enough energy.
Speaker A:And so what happens is you get the spiral where you get the sympathetic overload or overactivity.
Speaker A:You get this mitochondrial dysfunction, and it keeps going back and forth and back and forth.
Speaker A:In this spiral, because they feed each other.
Speaker A:And it's not just that we have all these external stresses that cause us to feel this sympathetic overload.
Speaker A:Yes, we have stressful jobs, relationships are taking care of, maybe parents and children in midlife.
Speaker A:We have issues with our, our partner, issues with multiple things.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:These are all ongoing.
Speaker A:But not only that, we're getting directly hit from all the toxins in our environment, medications that we're taking on a regular basis being insulin resistance or our blood sugars are too high, and, and more that are actually directly causing mitochondrial dysfunction itself.
Speaker A:And when that happens, even if you're not having an overt stress outside, or even if you are, but now you're compounding it with stress on the mitochondria itself, what happens there is that the mitochondria itself then start getting more damaged and they cause a sympathetic spiral to start revving up on its own, even without external stressors.
Speaker A:So, so you get this loop where no matter if the mitochondria were affected directly or you had this sympathetic overload because of external things, now you're in this spiral and, well, what do you feel right?
Speaker A:You feel like you're wired, but tired.
Speaker A:You can't recover very well.
Speaker A:The things you used to do easily, you can't do that as easily anymore.
Speaker A:Maybe stay up a little bit later at night or drink another, just one glass of alcohol in the evening, or get off a plane and you don't feel very good anymore.
Speaker A:You used to feel okay.
Speaker A:And so that's really what's happening, is over time, these things start accumulating and then we can typically get to a certain period of our life where a lot of this stuff doesn't, doesn't affect us until we start falling off a cliff.
Speaker A:And this typically starts happening in our late 30s and mid-40s.
Speaker B:I started measuring my heart rate variability when I got my first OURA ring many, many years ago.
Speaker A:Did you get the cool one with the big thing on top?
Speaker A:You get the first generation?
Speaker B:That was the gem one.
Speaker B:I actually had a gen 2 too.
Speaker B:So I didn't have the big bulky one, but I've had mine for quite a long time.
Speaker B:And interesting that even just since I've had my ordering, still my heart rate variability continues to go down every year, year to year.
Speaker B:Even though I'm trying to do all these things to improve my, my resiliency.
Speaker B:And I would say I'm a health optimizer, I really try to do everything in my power to improve my resiliency.
Speaker B:So maybe just for our listeners.
Speaker B:Can.
Speaker B:Can you explain the relationship of heart rate variability with our nervous system?
Speaker B:What happens in this area of why are we not able to bounce back to this parasympathetic state?
Speaker B:No matter how much I try to meditate or do breath work or to try to implement strategies to mitigate stress, give myself enough recovery.
Speaker B:Your body just does not want to recover.
Speaker B:And, and exactly.
Speaker B:This cycle of doom gets worse every year.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And I think what also puts a lot of women, pushes women into this chronic fatigue state is when they go into menopause or then something, they lose their hormones and that everything, it just feeds on itself.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:And makes things worse.
Speaker B:So can you touch on.
Speaker B:I would love it if you talk about heart rate variability first and how that correlates all this.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:When I first came up with this concept, one of the first ways I thought about actually referring to is the sympathetic spiral of dread.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:Because what happens is when you're in this sympathetic spiral, you dread not feeling good tomorrow.
Speaker A:You dread the feeling of how am I going to do it?
Speaker A:How am I going to take care of my kids, how am I going to take care of my job?
Speaker A:How am I going to do all this stuff?
Speaker A:You live in this futuristic dread place because you know you're having a, a tough time and it doesn't always start dramatically.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:It can all just start with mild things.
Speaker A:Mood instability.
Speaker A:You used to have a pretty stable mood.
Speaker A:Then all of a sudden you're just noticing you're yelling at people or that you're not being kind to yourself anymore.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And that's your self.
Speaker A:Talk can change pretty dramatically.
Speaker A:And also one of the things is we don't have enough energy.
Speaker A:When your brain doesn't have enough energy, you have a really hard time living in the nuance of things, right?
Speaker A:Living in the, the capacity for you to actually have some gray area.
Speaker A:We are, our brains, love black and white because it's easy, energetically easy.
Speaker A:And we have to think we have tons of mitochondria, as I mentioned, in our body, and I'll get to HRV in just a second, but you have tons of mitochondria in the body.
Speaker A:The mitochondria per cell is very interesting, Right.
Speaker A:So my daughter just, she's 15 and she just learned in science class, you have a cell and has a nucleus, it has mitochondria, it has a cytoplasm and things.
Speaker A:It literally has one mitochondria in the cell.
Speaker A:But there are some cells that have actually thousands of mitochondria per Cell and other cells that have very few or zero actually.
Speaker A:So the most mitochondria per cell are in the female egg, okay.
Speaker A:Right behind that is the male sperm.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:And then after that is the brain.
Speaker A:And so, and then after the brain is the heart, the liver, the musculoskeletal tissue.
Speaker A:And so you can think of all these symptoms you might have related to mitochondrial dysfunction.
Speaker A:And again, there could be many reasons for this, right?
Speaker A:We talked about this.
Speaker A:It could be from that sympathetic overload, which.
Speaker A:We'll talk about HIV here in a second.
Speaker A:But the HRV plays into all of this, right?
Speaker A:Because what's really happening is that you're not able to regulate your nervous system, right?
Speaker A:You're not able to regulate the, what I call this dynamic optimal balance or oscillation between your sympathetic and your parasympathetic nervous system.
Speaker A:So classically, we're supposed to be able to go back and forth very easily.
Speaker A:We're sympathetically dominant and we go down into parasympathetic, we're sympathetically dominant and we go back.
Speaker A:But it's very difficult for us to do this and, and because of modern society, modern life and everything we've been talking about here.
Speaker A:So to hrv, heart rate variability is a nice window into your capacity to see the balance, to have a balance between your sympathetic and your parasympathetic nervous system.
Speaker A:Okay?
Speaker A:So heart rate variability is measuring the beat to beat variability of your heart rate.
Speaker A:Now, most of you that are listening think you have a regular heart rhythm, and you do, right?
Speaker A:If you listen with a heart, with a stethoscope, for example, which most doctors don't do anymore.
Speaker A:For me, I thought I was just.
Speaker A:When I was still in the hospital doing hospital work, it was just, it was just something that I wore, hardly ever used.
Speaker A:Not that we shouldn't be using it more, but in general, the, the beat you would listen to would be, would be normal.
Speaker A:It would be 60 beats a minute or 100 beats a minute or whatever it might be.
Speaker A:60 to 100 is typically thought to be normal.
Speaker A:Okay?
Speaker A:Now, even though that's the case, you can't hear it, but you can pick it up with electrical activity that there's a small beat to beat variation with each heart beat.
Speaker A:And that beat to beat variation is a signal.
Speaker A:It is a, it is a representation of your capacity to maintain a good balance between your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system.
Speaker A:So the more variability you have actually beat to beat with is an increased HRV heart rate, variable heart rate variability, the More balance you actually have between your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, the less beat to beat variability you have, the less balance that you have and the poorer your HRV is.
Speaker A:Now, HRV is very much associated with longevity, cardiovascular health, brain health, neurogeneration, systemic health in general.
Speaker A:But everybody has to, has to understand that you don't want to compare your HRV and one of your wearables to somebody else's because the way it picks up on the algorithm of somebody else is going to be different from yours.
Speaker A:The most important thing to do is to look at your HRV as you were mentioning, or she over time and, and getting a sense of, well, how do you do.
Speaker A:So you can very much do these experiments.
Speaker A:If you have a couple of glasses of wine and go to bed, your HRV is going to tank, right?
Speaker A:If you have a very late night meal, for example, very likely your HRV is going to tank.
Speaker A:If you have a very stressful day, your HRV is going to tank.
Speaker A:And then you could think of the, in the other way you can do some certain things that may help your hrv because what's going to help your HR V and you were referring to this, is that learning how to get more parasympathetic.
Speaker A:And this can be hard for people because they don't know what it feels anymore to be in that parasympathetic mode.
Speaker A:They may think they're parasympathetic.
Speaker A:They may feel, oh yeah, I'm much more relaxed now, right.
Speaker A:But actually they're not really quite there.
Speaker A:And so what I take think about here, or she is the GABA system, specifically GABA is our primary neurotransmitter in the brain that calms down the firing of the brain.
Speaker A:It's the brakes of our brain.
Speaker A:It's always in balance with another neurotransmitter in our brain called glutamate.
Speaker A:Glutamate is a primary excitatory neurotransmitter.
Speaker A:And then we have gaba, which is your primary inhibitory.
Speaker A:But those that are listening may have not heard of, maybe they've heard of GABA before, but not specifically this.
Speaker A:Probably haven't heard of glutamate too much.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:Glutamate is, but it's, but those two neurotransmitters, glutamate and GABA are about 80% of your brain's neurotransmission.
Speaker A:So it's, it's a significant amount serotonin and dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine those are your superstar neurotransmitters.
Speaker A:But it's actually glutamate and GABA that run the show.
Speaker A:And glutamate gets converted into GABA in the brain.
Speaker A:And so there's always supposed to be a fine balance here.
Speaker A:And so when you're GABA deficient because you've been stressed and sympathetically overloaded for a long time, or your mitochondria are not working very well, you have anxiety, you have insomnia, you have depression, you have tremors, you have mental health problems, you go to a doctor, though, and say, hey, I have some of those symptoms.
Speaker A:They're not going to think about the GABA system most of the time.
Speaker A:They're gonna put you on an SSRI or something like that, right?
Speaker A:And those are your antidepressants.
Speaker A:But we very much know that people with depression do not have lower serotonin levels than people that do not have depression.
Speaker A:We used to think this in med, in medicine, but we don't have.
Speaker A:We used to think this is what I learned in medical school, but that's really not the case.
Speaker A:So the GABA system is what we really need to mind here and create a, an experience, create an ecosystem for, for patients is what I do to have them learn what it feels to come back down.
Speaker A:And then sometimes supplementation using that system can be helpful in various ways as well.
Speaker B:How do we support the GABA system?
Speaker B:What type of supplementation or strategies.
Speaker B:Lifestyle.
Speaker B:Lifestyle strategies do you recommend?
Speaker A:Well, first off is to understand that there's a short term way of approaching this and there's a longer, there's a medium term and there's a longer term way right there, the short term way is to give people the experience now of how it feels to, to calm down.
Speaker A:But what we don't say is, why don't you just calm down?
Speaker A:Because that's never going to work.
Speaker A:If you're married or you have a partner, you have a child, for example, these things do not work right.
Speaker A:You learn very early on in a relationship, why don't you just calm down, honey?
Speaker A:That doesn't ever work right.
Speaker A:And so number one is don't say calm down because that doesn't work.
Speaker A:Number two is when you're looking at supplementation to give people the experience, what I think about here is, well, GABA itself, the, the compound, the molecule, is something that's in a lot of supplements out there.
Speaker A:But the problem is that GABA is actually too big of a molecule on its own to get through into the brain.
Speaker A:If you take GABA supplements and they work for you.
Speaker A:If they're pure GABA supplements and not with something else, then actually what's probably going on here is that your brain barrier is leaking things in that shouldn't get in there.
Speaker A:So it's the leaky brain, unfortunately.
Speaker A:And if you have a leaky brain, you often, often have a leaky gut and you often have issues with many other things as well.
Speaker A:Again, mitochondrial dysfunction can be a part of this, but you'd have chronic infection.
Speaker A:Do you have chronic inflammation?
Speaker A:You need to work on the gut itself.
Speaker A:And that's a medium term, which I'll talk about in a minute.
Speaker A:But in essence, you want to use other compounds.
Speaker A:I typically do that can enhance the GABA system that I know will get into the brain.
Speaker A:So some of my favorites would be something kava, although you have to be a little bit careful with kava if you just use it on its own over time because it can cause its own issues.
Speaker A:Certainly what you don't want to use is alcohol, because alcohol binds to the GABA receptor very, very tightly at a separate location to where GABA binds and then increases the GABA binding, causing tolerance, withdrawal, and then eventually dependence too.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:You need more and you're, you're dependent over time.
Speaker A:Benzodiazepines are very similar benzos.
Speaker A:Ativan, Xanax, Valium, these also bind very tightly.
Speaker A:They, they're gonna make you feel okay and good, relaxed because it works on the GABA system, but over time cause a lot of issues.
Speaker A:So I use cava, C, B, D, C, B, G, non psychoactive cannabinoids.
Speaker A:I use something called nicotinel GABA, a vitamin B3 attached to the GABA because that gets the B3, gets the GABA to get through into the brain really nicely.
Speaker A:I also use another compound called agarin from a psychedelic mushroom called the amanita muscaria mushroom.
Speaker A:It's a red cap with white spots mushroom.
Speaker A:It's a, it's, I think, the most famous mushroom out there.
Speaker A:It's psychedelic and it's actually toxic if it's not dried.
Speaker A:But this one particular compound, ag, is not, not psychedelic at low doses and it's not neurotoxic.
Speaker A:There's another ingredient in the mushroom called ipotenic acid, which is.
Speaker A:So these are some of the compounds that I think about that can work on the GABA system.
Speaker A:And then I can give people the experience of calming down the nervous system and understanding what it feels to have a nervous system that calms down and what it feels to be in parasympathetic mode.
Speaker A:So those are some supplement supplementation that I'll use immediately.
Speaker A:But then the medium term is let's optimize your vitamins, minerals, nutrients and cofactors and lifestyle that can really support the GABA system more long term, right?
Speaker A:This looking at the precursor of gaba, which is glutamate and glutamine is the amino acid that turns into glutamate as well.
Speaker A:So looking at glutamine, for example, looking at some of the CO factors that allow the conversion of glutamate to GABA in the brain, including vitamin B6 and magnesium, optimizing the gut, optimizing the blood, brain barrier, vitamins, minerals, nutrients and things.
Speaker A:And then of course lifestyle things as well.
Speaker A:You talked about breath, work, meditation, learning these things can be very, very helpful.
Speaker A:That's a medium term and then longer term it's well, and this goes out throughout the whole time.
Speaker A:What's actually causing all your stress, right?
Speaker A:Is it because you need to be living in a different city because for whatever reason you're next to EMF towers and it's just not going well, Right.
Speaker A:Or is it you have a partner in bed that's snoring.
Speaker A:If you have a snoring partner, there's nothing that I can help you a little bit.
Speaker A:But if you don't get out of the room or you're partner stops, doesn't stop snoring, there's not a whole lot we're going to do long term, right?
Speaker A:And so getting a sleep divorce, for example, or if you had a lot of trauma in your childhood or even in adulthood and you haven't addressed a lot of that and you never feel safe, there's no way your body's ever going to feel safe either, right?
Speaker A:And no matter how much sympathetic downregulation I try with, with supplementation and with, with dietary changes, if that's the elephant in the room, it's going to stay the elephant in the room.
Speaker B:One thing that was really a game changer is electrolyte, figuring out minerals and electrolytes that my body needed.
Speaker B:But one thing that is still very challenging is the sleep architecture part.
Speaker B:Especially women once they start hormone replacement therapy.
Speaker B:Just taking progesterone at night can be super helpful if falling asleep.
Speaker B:But that doesn't necessarily help you with your sleep architecture of not waking up in the middle of the night.
Speaker B:And, and, and that's where a lot of that recovery is impaired.
Speaker B:You just don't have enough recovery.
Speaker B:You don't have enough REM sleep, especially if you wake up earlier than you like.
Speaker B:I've tried so many different strategies to try to improve my sleep architecture.
Speaker B:And just as, and if I'm, if I succeed, then my, my HRV also goes up, my heart rate variability.
Speaker B:I'm sure it does increases.
Speaker B:Because really, sleep is such a big lever in our health.
Speaker C:Right?
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:If it can get that dialed in, then it can really help with this sympathetic spiral of doom.
Speaker A:It's one of the first things that I work on, I mean, depending on the person.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Where they're at.
Speaker A:But if you can get somebody to sleep better, almost everything is going to get better.
Speaker A:And what sleep is, what's really interesting about sleep architecture is that sleep doesn't start, you know, when you go to bed, when you, when you're, you know, when your head hits the pillow.
Speaker A:It starts in the morning.
Speaker A:It's the entire day.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And that's the thing what people don't understand is that is understanding mitochondrial function.
Speaker A:And you mentioned minerals, for example.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:So what you're really doing with minerals is supporting your capacity to make energy better.
Speaker A:And these minerals are really good for that.
Speaker A:Getting good sunlight in the morning, for example, timing your meals and not eating too later, and also thinking about what you're actually eating throughout the day and then making sure you're not eating too close to bed.
Speaker A:And so I'm a big fan of, of mineral hydration as being a big, big lever for a lot of people because people don't realize that we need a lot of minerals to help support our mitochondrial function.
Speaker A:And so what's interesting.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Is if you can support the mitochondria during the day better.
Speaker A:Of course, working on stress is important here too.
Speaker A:You're gonna sleep better in the evening, and your sleep architecture is going to be better if you're supporting the mitochondria better throughout the day.
Speaker A:So I think when I.
Speaker A:There's a couple different ways I think about this, but I maybe go back a small point, which, which is important though, or a small minute, which is an important point.
Speaker A:Is that what I think about, and this is something that Dr. Ted, who I was mentioning earlier, he's the founder of, of the nonprofit also our company Troscriptions, that makes products in this space.
Speaker A:He said very early to me, and something we talk about a lot, is that instead of sleeping, the last thing on your checklist, every single day that you do, it should be the first thing.
Speaker A:Your, your day starts when you go to bed, not when you wake up and Then if you treat it that it starts becoming more of that foundational lever and you realize you can get away with it.
Speaker A:I got away with it for a long time, too.
Speaker A:I mean, I was in medical school.
Speaker A:My friends and I had shirts made that said sleep is for quitters.
Speaker A:So if you're.
Speaker A:That's.
Speaker A:That's how.
Speaker A:That's the mentality.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And I was able to do that.
Speaker A:I mean, that's why we have kids when we're younger too, typically.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Because you're more resilient to those kinds of things.
Speaker A:And not being, not being as subject to being so challenged for days and days after not getting good sleep.
Speaker A:And Even through my 30s, I was getting woken up in the middle of night, being home and as a hospital doctor and taking calls from the emergency room and nurses, and then waking up the next day and going to work and being fine.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Maybe I had a cup of coffee, but that was pretty much it.
Speaker A:But at some point, that stops not being.
Speaker A:It stops being possible as easily because you don't bounce back as much.
Speaker A:So I'm a big fan of.
Speaker A:And a huge.
Speaker A:I have a huge emphasis in my practice on sleep architecture or she.
Speaker A:And I think for people listening, what that means is that throughout the night, it's not.
Speaker A:We're just anesthesia dead and just doing nothing.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:We have deep sleep.
Speaker A:We have four stages of that.
Speaker A:We have REM sleep, and we're supposed to cycle through those.
Speaker A:And then in the beginning of the night, we have more deep sleep.
Speaker A:And then the.
Speaker A:And the latter part of the evening, we have more REM sleep.
Speaker A:Typically as we get older, we're not supposed to really go down in deep sleep too much until we get into our 80s or so that.
Speaker A:But it's supposed to be pretty stable somewhere in your 20s until your 70s or 80s.
Speaker A:But most people have a huge difficult time with deep sleep especially.
Speaker A:And then waking up in the middle of night is a big problem as well, especially when you're going through those midlife changes and then the stress levels are through the roof and your mitochondria aren't very well supported.
Speaker A:You're not really working on circadian rhythm balance throughout the day as well, and taking breaks and working on your sympathetic nervous system.
Speaker A:So I find with my patients, sleep is the first lever that I try to pull in.
Speaker A:So if I can get somebody to sleep better and improve their architecture, then almost everything else is gonna get easier.
Speaker A:And, and, and, and I think it's a great emphasis.
Speaker A:But I think about the other thing.
Speaker A:I mean, I can say about sleep here that's probably important for people is that melatonin is not gonna do the trick for you.
Speaker A:Most of the time, melatonin is a signal for sleep.
Speaker A:Even progesterone is very, very helpful.
Speaker A:But on their own, they're not going to be the entire story.
Speaker A:You have melatonin involved, you have serotonin, you have the GABA system, you have the adenosine system, you have the endocannabinoid system, all working together in various ways in the opposite realms of your cortisol and your norepinephrine and or, and epinephrine.
Speaker A:And so that those are your stress hormones, right?
Speaker A:So you have to have enough of those sleep compounds floating around in the evening to help maintain your sleep and enough mitochondrial support that throughout that process to be able to maintain sleep too.
Speaker A:Especially because REM sleep especially is very, very mitochondrially active.
Speaker A:It's a, it's a highly active state.
Speaker A:So if you look at somebody's brain when they're sleeping and you look at REM sleep, it's as active as, as if they were awake.
Speaker A:And most of you know this, right?
Speaker A:You can have crazy ass dreams.
Speaker A:I did have another one last night.
Speaker A:It was a crazy.
Speaker A:I woke up in the morning, one of those mornings.
Speaker A:Do I have to do all the things that I, I said I was gonna do in my dream?
Speaker A:I thought I had to drive very far and take my daughter someplace and it was going to be very stressful.
Speaker A:You know, is this something that happens?
Speaker A:Said no, actually that's, that was a dream, right?
Speaker A:It was one of those kinds of dreams.
Speaker A:So your mitochondria needs a lot of support so that you can maintain REM sleep too.
Speaker A:And what's interesting about REM sleep is that if you're getting chased by a lion in your sleep, why don't you wake up?
Speaker A:Well, number one, you're paralyzed in REM sleep.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker A:But sleep paralysis and waking up in REM sleep can be nasty.
Speaker A:But you're also having enough of that GABA serotonin and, and melatonin support while you're in REM sleep that you don't wake up.
Speaker A:And so if you don't have enough support there, that's one of the reasons why you do wake up.
Speaker B:One more thing I just want to touch on, because we started the conversation of minerals, is that one thing that was shocking to me, that how much I needed of magnesium, potassium and sodium, really large amounts.
Speaker B:A lot of people don't realize it's not just a little bit that your body needs.
Speaker B:When you're in chronic stress states, those three minerals tend to be extremely deficient.
Speaker B:And everybody's different.
Speaker B:But.
Speaker B:And you have to personalize that.
Speaker B:But when I'm traveling, when I'm doing things that are especially more stressful than, than normal, my body just takes up very large amounts of.
Speaker B:Yeah, all, all three of these.
Speaker A:The, the simple way to think about this, and I think it's important, is that when you're stressed and all the time, or you have that fight or flight nervous system.
Speaker A:We talked about hormones and neurotransmitters.
Speaker A:The main hormone that we're looking at here is cortisol.
Speaker A:Cortisol is our hormone.
Speaker A:It's a, a stress hormone.
Speaker A:It's our steroid hormone that gets released by your adrenal glands, which are on the top of your kidneys.
Speaker A:And your cortisol level is supposed to go up in the morning, but when it does, it revs up metabolism too.
Speaker A:So you wake up in the morning, right?
Speaker A:What cortisol is supposed to do is, is start breaking down sugar and fat and dump it into your bloodstream so that it can get to your cells so you can make energy.
Speaker A:So that's how we make energy.
Speaker A:We make energy from sugar, right?
Speaker A:From glucose.
Speaker A:We make energy from fat and fat byproducts, right?
Speaker A:And so in the morning when you wake up, cortisol levels are supposed to go up so you can do this and you feel more wakeful.
Speaker A:And then throughout the day they're supposed to go down, and by the end of the evening, they're supposed to be at their lowest level.
Speaker A:And so this is why they always say, don't exercise right before you go to bed, because your cortisol level will go up and it can mess with your circadian rhythms and have you wake up at strange times and not feel very wakeful in the morning, for example.
Speaker A:But what happens over time is that when you're making energy, energy requires a lot of machinery in the body to make effectively.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:You have to have enough vitamins, minerals, nutrients and minerals, as I said.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker A:Minerals.
Speaker A:Minerals, right.
Speaker A:To be able to do that.
Speaker A:Minerals are a big deficiency for so many of us.
Speaker A:Sodium, for sure.
Speaker A:Magnesium, Absolutely.
Speaker A:Most people are running around magnesium deficient, I think 90% of the US population or something like that.
Speaker A:And that's because most of the food that we eat now is significantly more mineral deficient, unless you're eating lots, lots of liver and things like that.
Speaker A: % less than it was in the: Speaker A:And so it takes a lot more or, or, or very specific types of food to be able to get enough minerals or to supplement them, as you said.
Speaker A:And so cortisol in short bursts is good for you.
Speaker A:It's something that helps you get more wakeful, it gives you energy, it requires the energy, the energy capacity that you have.
Speaker A:But over long term, what happens is that if cortisol elevated for a long period of time, what it starts making things very deficient.
Speaker A:Your capacity to make energy goes down because you're mineral deficient now you're nutrient deficient.
Speaker A:And then not only, not only that, your antioxidant deficient too, because you're supposed to when you make energy.
Speaker A:Our cells are more gasoline powered cars, meaning that we make ATP, our energy currency, but we also make water and carbon dioxide which are fine, but we also in addition make reactive oxygen species or free radicals related to energy production.
Speaker A:Energy's not free and so we need antioxidants in the body to be able to neutralize that.
Speaker A:And over time we deplete those.
Speaker A:And then you still have cortisol floating around.
Speaker A:And instead of making energy, you're starting to actually deposit visceral fat, fat around your organs as a protective measure at trying to keep you alive if this continues to happen.
Speaker A:I think.
Speaker B:So we've been talking about mitochondrial function and cellular energy production quite a bit.
Speaker B:We'd love to have you talk a little bit about methylene blue.
Speaker B:It was the single most important supplement.
Speaker B:It was life changing for me to discover methylene blue and to improve my mitochondrial function and energy production pull me out of that chronic state of feeling so depleted and low energy for extended period.
Speaker B:And even though I would say my, my nervous system is still not as balanced as I like it to be, I have the tools in my toolkit to perform.
Speaker B:But I would love it if you talked about it because methylene really is such a complex topic and I think people are scared of it.
Speaker B:They don't understand how to, how to take it, what it does.
Speaker B:And it's also not super cookie cutter because I think there's a lot of nuance to that Goldilocks amount that you, your body needs for, for each person.
Speaker B:So could you talk about it a
Speaker A:little bit before I do?
Speaker A:What's your Goldilocks zone for methylene blue
Speaker B:or for me it's 12 milligrams.
Speaker B:12 milligrams a day is my Goldilocks.
Speaker B:And then if I'm, if I Don't work out.
Speaker B:I could go down to six.
Speaker B:And then sometimes I take a few days off too, so I don't take it continuously.
Speaker B:But for me, especially if I'm gonna have a heavy workout day, especially a leg day, I need 12 milligrams.
Speaker B:So I know exactly because I've been playing around with it for quite a long time to know exactly how much my body needs.
Speaker B:And then Dr. Scott and I were chatting right before we started that I'm traveling right now, so I especially have my little stash of methylene flu with me to help me with my jet lag.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:So it's been, it's been really incredibly helpful.
Speaker B:I mean, I would say it's probably the most powerful supplement in my toolkit that, that I have.
Speaker B:The strategy is not very black and white.
Speaker B:It's not just something you take off the shelf because the quality is not there.
Speaker B:If you could talk about why is it helpful in mitochondrial function, what it does and then.
Speaker B:But you guys developed an amazing product, so I would love to have you talk about that as well.
Speaker A:Of course.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So I appreciate your experience.
Speaker A:It's always nice to hear and see somebody reflect back what's possible.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:With this particular compound.
Speaker A:And I admittedly, I was skeptical about it in the beginning too, because methylene blue is.
Speaker A:It's been around a long time.
Speaker A:It's been around over 125 years.
Speaker A: It was first developed in the: Speaker A:And it's had a long storied history for multiple different things.
Speaker A: terested in methylene blue in: Speaker A:And that's really where the low dosing really does shine.
Speaker A:Somewhere between about 4 to about 25 milligrams for most people taken once or twice a day can have a profound effect on mitochondrial function.
Speaker A:Well, what does that mean?
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:It can help with energy, can help with detoxification, it can help with pain, inflammation, it can help with brain fog, mental health issues, chronic conditions.
Speaker A:I've just seen across the board, mild cognitive impairment and so many more things.
Speaker A:And what it really comes down to is that as I was alluding to earlier, our mitochondria are more gasoline powered engines, right?
Speaker A:They have a huge rotor that helps us make this ATP.
Speaker A:We make £150 of ATP every single day.
Speaker A:As I mentioned earlier, many of us have mitochondrial dysfunction, and this is actually a very large number.
Speaker A:It's about 94% of the U.S. population.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:It's a huge amount of people.
Speaker A:Only 6% of people are metabolically healthy.
Speaker A:And so when you're making energy, and as I mentioned, there's two steps to this, right?
Speaker A:There's making energy and then there's, you make the energy and then you have the utilization of it and you have the waste products that are made when you make it.
Speaker A:Okay?
Speaker A:And so 94% of US population has some element of challenge either making energy or detoxifying.
Speaker A:And so where methylene blue potentially comes in here is that it has the capacity both help to help you make more energy effectively to compensate for the energy you're not making effectively, and also at the same time can work directly in antioxidant and detoxifier.
Speaker A:So instead of being a gasoline powered engine, it's more than an electric powered engine.
Speaker A:It's electric powered.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Because there's no exhaust, you're making more energy.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:But you're not causing stress on the system when you're doing this.
Speaker A:And so energy in general is not free.
Speaker A:But if you get a lower dose of methylene blue.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker A:You actually are seeing that the energy can be free.
Speaker A:And as a result of that, you're not getting the stress on the system that may happen if you're trying to make more energy.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:A couple different ways to think about this, right?
Speaker A:If you are giving something that gives more energy, for example, say you're drinking lots of caffeine, right?
Speaker A:Caffeine's gonna give you more energy, but you don't have enough detox capacity to maintain the, the machinery to continue to feel good with that energy.
Speaker A:Because you're gonna feel terrible if you don't have enough antioxidant capacity.
Speaker A:You're still not gonna feel good even if you have more energy, or you're gonna crash right now on the other side of things, if you're just giving detoxifiers, giving glutathione or alpha lipoic acid or vitamin C, and you're detoxifying better, but you don't have enough capacity to make energy, then you're still not gonna feel very good even if you've done the detox.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:This is people that will do detox protocols and feel still feel crap, right?
Speaker A:Because they've done the detox, but they still don't have enough energy being made.
Speaker A:And so what methylene blue can do is at these lower doses is as long as you have a good quality methylene blue, which we'll talk about, is that what it can do?
Speaker A:Is it help you on the energy side and the detox side at the same time?
Speaker A:The key here though is low doses, because if you get to be higher doses, around about a milligram per kilogram, which is gonna be about 50 to 70 milligrams, what's, what starts happening is that not only, not only you're getting this energy and detox, but you're also getting more stress on the system.
Speaker A:And because what's going to happen is that methane blue is going to create more hydrogen peroxide in the body.
Speaker A:Now people have heard of hydrogen peroxide, you can buy it at the store as an antiseptic.
Speaker A:But our cells actually make this real time to kill viruses, fungus and bacteria.
Speaker A:So this is why higher doses of methylene blue are actually anti infective and are profoundly anti infective in a, in a very good way, in a way that actually doesn't kill everything else in the process, which is pretty interesting.
Speaker A:An antibiotic would.
Speaker A:But these higher doses can be stressful because they cause hydrogen peroxide production.
Speaker A:And we have more hydrogen peroxide in the system.
Speaker A:You also make more stress in the system and you require more antioxidants to be available to be able to neutralize that.
Speaker A:And so the key is to keep the dose low.
Speaker A:And the key is to get good quality stuff because methylene blue can be contaminated when it's made with things like lead, mercury, arsenic and cadmium, which, these, these are heavy metals that you don't want in the body.
Speaker A:And liquids are the biggest culprit we found over the years.
Speaker A: r with methylene blue back in: Speaker A:And the problem is that most of the things out there online now, even if they say they're pharmaceutical grade, usp, which is the, the letters that we use for pharmaceutical grade, they don't typically meet the criteria and often, often contaminate it.
Speaker A:Unfortunately, when we've done internal testing and in addition, the potency of what it says on the label may be nowhere near what you think it is.
Speaker A:And liquids are the biggest culprit of this.
Speaker A:I had a friend of mine, her name's Ashley, she's a practitioner in California and she was one of our.
Speaker A:This is a long time ago, maybe four years ago and she was taking, she, what she thought was 8 milligrams of methylene blue in a liquid for bartonella symptoms.
Speaker A:And then she started taking 8 milligrams of our stuff and it was like an entirely different experience because she was actually getting 8 milligrams every single time.
Speaker A:And so quality is a big, big deal.
Speaker A:And this is across the whole supplement industry or she, I know you know this too, but there's no regulations here.
Speaker A:You have to self regulate yourself if that makes sense or if you're not, you could be selling things outta your garage.
Speaker A:I, I mean I remember about a year ago I started hearing rumblings of people making methylene blue in their garages and selling them on Amazon.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Because you can sell anything on Amazon.
Speaker A:So be, be careful.
Speaker A:The one thing I, I recommend, nobody ever buys on Amazon, at least from an Amazon warehouse, is a supplement of any type, but especially methylene blue because you just don't know what you're getting.
Speaker B:Could you speak a little bit more about what is redox balance and what are the risk of using redox active compounds without addressing the nervous system regulation first?
Speaker A:Yes, a redox is a, basically our capacity to make energy and detox.
Speaker A:So, and so most compounds, almost all compounds out there do one or the other.
Speaker A:They either help with you with making more energy or they help with detoxification.
Speaker A:There's only two compounds that I know that do both.
Speaker A:Okay, what problem with the problem we have though, the two compounds, Let me, let me just say what those two compounds are.
Speaker A:The first one would be methylene blue as we've been talking about here.
Speaker A:And it's probably the most powerful redox cycler.
Speaker A:So it has the capacity to go back and forth energy enhancing detoxification.
Speaker A:Interestingly enough, it is blue, quite blue when it's in one state and when it's in another state when it's picking up electrons and being an antioxidant and picks up those electrons actually turns into a colorless state.
Speaker A:So it goes from blue to colorless blue to colorless back and forth and sticks in the body for about four to six hours as a half life and then is excreted in your kidneys, through your kidneys.
Speaker A:And so that's why when you, you know, take methylene blue you urinate blue and that's where, that's, you know, that's just a fun fact that you know if you haven't taken methylene blue, your urine will turn some shade of blue.
Speaker A:And depending on how much methylene you're taking What I found, at least classically, is that if you're under more stress in general, you know, sympathetic stress, mitochondrial stress, whatever, stress in general, that it takes longer or takes a higher dose of methylene blue to get to the place where you start getting blue urine.
Speaker A:What you typically find, again, this is not across the board if you use SO transcriptions.
Speaker A:What we have, we've developed something called a buccal troche.
Speaker A:It's a dissolvable lozenge that you.
Speaker A:Goes between your upper cheek and gums.
Speaker A:I have some over here I can show on the camera.
Speaker A:But what it, what it, what it is, it's a lozenge that looks like this.
Speaker A:It's very small.
Speaker A:You know, it's got.
Speaker A:And, and it's got, it's scored in the middle.
Speaker A:It's got a little cross in there, right?
Speaker A:So you can take a quarter or a half or full, depending on what you'd like.
Speaker A:And it's, it's, it's a buckle, meaning that it's supposed to go between your upper cheek and gum and dissolve over about 15 to 30 minutes.
Speaker A:Um, what's nice about buckle absorption is it's very fast, and, um, so it's not going through digestion.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:But.
Speaker A:And then in general, most compounds lose their potency when they go through your stomach and your intestines and your liver and things like that.
Speaker A:Methylene blue is actually an exception to this rule.
Speaker A:Um, methylene blue is highly bioavailable.
Speaker A:So whether you use it as a buckle trochee, or you swallow it, you're still getting most of it in the system.
Speaker A:It's gonna be faster if you dissolve in the mouth.
Speaker A:So that's, that's important.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Um, and that's something that, that I always emphasize.
Speaker A:But if you do dissolve methylene blue in your mouth, your mouth is gonna turn, you know, quite blue in the process.
Speaker A:So you have to be aware of that.
Speaker A:Most people just end up swallowing it.
Speaker A:It's best swallowed on an empty stomach.
Speaker A:And then you'll typically start feeling the effects if you swallow it on an empty stomach within about 30 to 45 minutes.
Speaker A:Um, it's usually kind of a good idea, like, as a nice little hack to eat about 20 or 30 minutes later after having your methylene blue, because that's gonna help push it forward a little bit further and a little bit faster and get it metabolized a little bit faster.
Speaker A:So in general, with methylene blue, it can be taken any way orally in the mouth, or it can be swallowed and the mitochondrial Effects are going to be the same, which is going to be the speed at which it gets into the body overall.
Speaker B:Can you also talk a little bit about how can it break us out of this spiral of sympathetic dominance by using something like methylene blue?
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker A:What I forgot to mention also just before is that when it comes to redox agents, the.
Speaker A:The one that.
Speaker A:The.
Speaker A:The redox cycle that we.
Speaker A:We're just been talking about is methylene blue.
Speaker A:The other one that does have some redox capacity, both helping with energy and detox, seems to be molecular hydrogen.
Speaker A:Actually, this one's probably more tipped to the detoxification side than the energy side for most people.
Speaker A:Um, but there is some way.
Speaker A:We don't exactly know how that hydrogen, especially inhaled hydrogen, has a little bit better studies like, but oral, you know, ingestible hydrogen seems to have the capacity, too, to be able to help with.
Speaker A:Help with both energy and detoxification.
Speaker A:So I had a colleague reach out to me about a couple months ago now, and he was like, scott, I've had anxiety all my life.
Speaker A:I started taking methane blue and the anxiety went away, just went away.
Speaker A:And, well, well, why is that?
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:We know that when we support mitochondrial function, the system can finally start calming down because you're starting to break that spiral, right?
Speaker A:You're trying to break that mitochondrial stress that's causing that sympathetic spiral to get worse.
Speaker A:Now, you have to address the sympathetic aspect of these, of this too.
Speaker A:Is there external stresses, you know, work, job, family, et cetera, that are causing that sympathetic activation?
Speaker A:On the outside, that's still important.
Speaker A:But before in the clinical practice, before I do that, before I really address a lot of that external stress that people have, I want to support the mitochondria, right?
Speaker A:Because if I can support the mitochondria now and then in a little while, I start bringing them down their nervous system, down regulation, then they actually can tolerate that without feeling like crap.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:Because if you just decrease somebody's nervous system.
Speaker A:I was just talking to another lady she was describing is that she went to her doctor, she had mold exposure and was in this sympathetic spiral because of that.
Speaker A:Okay?
Speaker A:Her doctor gave her stuff to calm down her nervous system, and it just.
Speaker A:It just crashed her.
Speaker A:It made her feel even worse, right?
Speaker A:And that's because she wasn't getting enough mitochondrial support while this sympathetic nervous system was being downregulated.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:And so what methylene blue can do, and I've seen this now in countless examples, is that it can start supporting the mitochondria.
Speaker A:Now, as that Redox agent, right?
Speaker A:As that redox cycler.
Speaker A:And then as that mitochondrial support is in place, then you can take the next step of actually downregulating the nervous system in a way that allows you to actually feel the effects in a positive way of dropping that sympathetic overdrive.
Speaker B:Right?
Speaker A:Because that sympathetic overdrive you think is keeping you safe and alive, but.
Speaker A:But it's actually significantly decreasing your capacity, right?
Speaker A:Because all of us know if you're a little bit less stressed, you perform better, right?
Speaker A:That's because the front of your brain gets less oxygen, less blood flow when you're sympathetically dominant.
Speaker A:And a good example of this, I have a friend of mine who's a Olympic skier and NFL wide wide receiver, the only person to ever do Olympics and NFL.
Speaker A:And when he first started doing Olympic ski runs, he would listen to Metallica, right?
Speaker A:Hard, heavy metal.
Speaker A:But then as he was becoming an elite athlete, he would listen to Mozart, Beethoven, why?
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:Because then you can drop your nervous system down, you're gonna perform better, you're gonna be more coherent with the world around you, and you're just gonna.
Speaker A:That's why we say being the opposite of the sympathetic spiral of doom is the parasympathetic edge in everything that you do.
Speaker A:Because if you can come down a little bit, you're going to function better.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:But learning how to do that and, and supporting mitochondria along the way are essential.
Speaker B:I definitely suggest that people really educate themselves before they start experimenting and pick the right supplements like transcriptions, and definitely consume the educational content first.
Speaker B:And Dr. Scott, have some amazing information out there.
Speaker B:We'd love to shift a little bit and just talk to you about the health optimization industry in general.
Speaker B:Where do you think that industry is heading over the next to 10 years?
Speaker B:We have a lot of advancements with AI regulatory changes.
Speaker B:There's a lot of black label warnings that are getting removed from hormones and exciting changes in the industry.
Speaker B:Where do you see things going?
Speaker A:That's a really good and big question.
Speaker A:There's a couple things that I think one of the main ones that I've really been seeing percolate recently is mitochondrial medicine.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker A:The idea that these parts of our cell are so, so important.
Speaker A:And now you hear a lot of things about cellular medicine and precision medicine and Health Optimization Medicine, which is our nonprofit.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:That helps train practitioners.
Speaker A:A big focus on this is, is energy metabolism, is the capacity to make energy and to harness that energy effectively and then detox appropriately.
Speaker A:And this is something that I've been thinking about a long Time now, when it comes to multiple things that I'm involved with, including hyperbaric medicine, right.
Speaker A:When you're throwing a lot of oxygen in the system in a chamber.
Speaker A:So I think you're going to see a lot more emphasis on, at least, I'm hoping, bringing things down levels.
Speaker A:In health optimization medicine, what we talk about is changing the conversation, but between what we call organology to holobiontology.
Speaker A:Organology is the study of your heart, your liver, your brain, your organs, to holobiontology, which is this cool term called the holobiont.
Speaker A:H O L O B O B I O N T. I'll try that again.
Speaker A:H O L O B I O N T. The holobiont, and this is the other way to describe is the holo organism.
Speaker A:That is you, okay?
Speaker A:And that is you're made up not only of human cells, but bacteria, fungus and virus.
Speaker A:You're, you're in an environment.
Speaker A:All of these things can be measured.
Speaker A:And the key measuring location for all of this is not the organ itself, but actually in the basic cell that runs every single organ and tissue that you have.
Speaker A:And so if you can optimize at that basic cellular level, everything else gets better, right?
Speaker A:If you just start looking at things from a tissue or organ level without looking at that base level, this is where people get into trouble, right?
Speaker A:If you're just looking at improving your heart function, but you're not looking at the cell itself, you're going to give things that improve your heart capacity for maybe a short period of time, but it may not be something healthy for you, right?
Speaker A:Brain function, nootropics are the same deal.
Speaker A:Taking more Adderall is probably not going to help you long term, right?
Speaker A:Or drinking more caffeine or having a huge amount of nicotine.
Speaker A:A little bit of all these things can be helpful, right?
Speaker A:But maybe not.
Speaker A:Adderall is not my favorite, but you get my point, right?
Speaker A:So I think a big shift from organology to holobiontology, I hope also a big shift, I hope as well, will be looking at things not from just a longevity perspective, but also from a health span perspective, right?
Speaker A:You, everybody's talking about longevity, longevity, longevity, but what they really mean, I think, I hope, is that you live as healthy as you can for as long as you can and then die very quickly.
Speaker A:That's called morbidity compression, which is the idea that you're healthy as you can and you die very quickly.
Speaker A:Unfortunately, most people are living longer, but their morbidity, the amount of pain and suffering, although they say that pain is inevitable.
Speaker A:Suffering is optional.
Speaker A:But the amount of pain, the amount of pain and disability that people have is dramatically going up, especially for females, especially for women actually who have a lot more morbidity and live longer with that than males do in general.
Speaker A:So my hope is that we can have more of a conversation about healthspan as opposed to lifespan and longevity.
Speaker A: or: Speaker A:I think that's interesting.
Speaker A:But I think that's still, which is focusing on healthspan and I think what's the last.
Speaker A:Those are two, two trends that I see a lot of.
Speaker A:I'm really excited for a lot of the newer, the capacity for us to be able to use big data sets and really see people shift long term because we have a better idea of what's actually happening.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And so the idea of that can give you more real time and then long term feedback and actually what's working for you.
Speaker A:So how my lights, my, my red light therapy, how, how is it working with my sauna or my chamber or even my exercise regimen, how is this all working together?
Speaker A:So I think this integrated systems approach where nothing is stupid anymore, everything is smart is really what's exciting to me because you can crunch all this data in various ways to make your regiment yours, Your N of 1.
Speaker A:Because if you're looking at population data, that's not you, that's a population.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:So looking at things, I think The N of 1 is going to be so much more powerful as well because of having that unique data that we're all going to be wearing and living and being in various ways.
Speaker B:Ultimately that's what it comes down to.
Speaker B:I've been, I've been working on that N1 for a while and, and it's a constant improvement on your looking at your own data, looking at your own supplements, lifestyle interventions and see what really moves the needle for you because it's so individual for so many people can go to an expert, Dr. Scott and get some really good advice and some therapies, but you have to take charge of your own health and take, take ownership of it, don't outsource it to other people, get expert to help you.
Speaker B:But, but you have to be ultimately be responsible for it and track it and figure out what, what works for you, right?
Speaker A:100%.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And I think having all that data that all of us are going to have and now have starting to get individually is really, really great.
Speaker A:Be careful what's out there, though, because large language models will tell you what you want to hear.
Speaker A:They'll also give you.
Speaker A:Get you down rabbit holes.
Speaker A:You may not be.
Speaker A:You may not want to go in.
Speaker A:So always.
Speaker A:I think working with a practitioner is still super important when you're trying to navigate all this.
Speaker A:I have a.
Speaker A:A patient of mine that has reached out today.
Speaker A:I have three LLMs and I'm running all these data and I'm crunching it all.
Speaker A:Let's just have a conversation before you start getting crazy with all this stuff, right?
Speaker A:Because there's nuance in all of this and there's that human connection that maybe at some point will be gone, but I can read intuitively thousands apart of your facial expressions that I'm not even thinking about consciously when I'm talking to you.
Speaker A:That understand helps me understand really where you are and where things need to go go.
Speaker A:So the human connection part is big and taking a good history and having a good relationship with somebody, that's stuff that's really difficult to replace.
Speaker A:And maybe eventually we can, right?
Speaker A:But right now, I don't.
Speaker A:I don't think we're quite there, even with all the cool data and language models and everything else that we have.
Speaker B:So, Dr. Scott, how can people find you?
Speaker A:Dr. Scott.com d r s C O T T S h e r r dot com.
Speaker A:You can check it out at troscriptions.com I also have a company called One Base Health that does a lot of interconnected systems and embedded software and hardware to help connect you with your wearables and things like that, to learn how best to optimize your.
Speaker A:Your programs and.
Speaker A:And your.
Speaker A:What you're looking to do for your health over the long term.
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Speaker C:This is Maya.
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Speaker C:Better conversations, better tools and health strategies that are actually built for our physical physiology.
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